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User blog:Cynical04TR/In Memory of Hrant Dink
Hrant Dink was an Armenian journalist who was killed after he was shot by a 17-year-old Turkish chauvinist just outside of his office in Istanbul. Tommorrow marks the 11th anniversary of his assassination. Throughout his lifetime, he touched the lives of many people. His father's gambling debts led to the family's move to Istanbul in 1960, where they sought a new beginning. Unfortunately, That did not quite work out and his parents had a divorce when he was only 7 years old. After their parents' divorce, his grandparents enrolled him and his two brothers at the Gedikpaşa Armenian Orphanage. Dink often noted his grandfather, who spoke many languages and read constantly, as the role model and father figure who inspired his love of letters. He lived in the orphanage for 10 years. The orphanage children spent their summers at the Tuzla Armenian Children's Camp (Camp Armen), building and improving the summer camp during their stay. Camp Armen played a significant role in Hrant Dink's life, both personally, as he met his future wife as a child and later married her at the Camp, and professionally, as the government-led closing of the Camp in 1984 was a major factor that raised Dink's awareness of the issues of the Armenian community and eventually led to him becoming an activist. After the 1980 Turkish coup, when it became difficult for Turkish citizens to obtain passports for travel abroad, His brother started travelling to Beirut and Europe by using forged ID papers. When he was caught, Dink was also taken into custody as an associate. Dink was questioned twice again by the police, once when a former resident of the Tuzla Camp was investigated for possible connections to ASALA, an Armenian terrorist organization and again when Hrant Güzelyan, who ran Camp Armen, was arrested and charged with anti-Turkish propaganda and had ASALA demand his release when they occupied the Turkish Consulate General in Paris and took hostages. After Güzelyan's arrest, Dink and his wife Rakel took over the management of Camp Armen. In 1979, the General Directorate of Foundations started a court action to annul Gedikpaşa Armenian Protestant Church's ownership of the camp, based on a 1974 ruling by the Court of Appeals that made it impossible for minority foundations to own real estate beyond what they possessed in 1936. In 1984, after a 5-year long legal battle, Camp Armen was closed down. ''"I went to Tuzla when I was 8. I poured my labour in there for 20 years. I met my wife Rakel there. We grew up together. We were married in the camp. Our children were born there... After the September 12 coup, our camp manager was arrested on the claim that he was raising Armenian militants. A wrongful claim. None of us was brought up to be a militant. My friends and I, each of us old charges of the camp, rushed to fill the job to save the camp and the orphanage from shutting down. But then, one day they handed us a paper from a court... 'We just found out that your minority institutions don't have a right to buy real estate. We should never have given you that permission way back then. This place will now revert to its old owner.' We fought for five years and we lost... Little chance we had with the state as the contester. Hear my plea, brothers, sisters!.." -Hrant Dink'' In 1996, he co-founded Agos. A Bilingual Newspaper that has both Armenian and Turkish pages as well as an online English edition. Agos was born out of a meeting called by Patriarch Karekin II when mainstream media started linking Armenians of Turkey with the illegal Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). A picture of PKK's leader Abdullah Öcalan and an Assyrian priest appeared in a Turkish daily, with the caption "Here's proof of the Armenian-PKK cooperation. Patriarch Karekin II asked the attendees at the meeting what needed to be done and the opinion that emerged from the meeting was that the Armenians in Turkey needed to communicate with the society at large. The group held a widely covered press conference, followed by monthly press events and eventually formed Agos. He wrote for Agos until his tragic death in 2007. Unfortunately, he was prosecuted three times under the Article 301 of the Turkish constitution which states that it is illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish nation, or Turkish government institutions. Most notably, for his article called "Getting to know Armenia", in which he suggested to diaspora Armenians that it was time to rid themselves of their enmity against Turks, a condition he considered himself free of, keeping himself emotionally healthy while at the same time knowing something of discrimination. His statement, "replace the poisoned blood associated with the Turk, with fresh blood associated with Armenia" resulted in a six-month suspended sentence. During his trial, he insisted that the arrest was due to a major misunderstanding. Unfortunately, the court did not listen and he was sentenced to 6 months in prison, however, his sentence was delayed and he never served it. Dink appealed to the European Court of Human Rights for an overturn of the ruling on January 15. The appeal suggests that Article 301 compromises freedom of expression and that Dink has been discriminated against because of his Armenian ethnicity. He was also sued under the same article for recognizing the Armenian Genocide. However, during his trial, something tragic happened. Dink was assassinated in Istanbul around 12:00 GMT on January 19, 2007, as he returned to the offices of Agos. The killer was reported to have introduced himself as an Ankara University student who wanted to meet with Mr Dink. When his request was rejected, he waited in front of a nearby bank for a while. According to eyewitnesses, Dink was shot by a man of 25 to 30 years of age, who fired three shots at Dink's head from the back at point-blank range before fleeing the scene on foot. Another witness, the owner of a restaurant near the Agos office, said the assassin looked about 20, wore jeans and a cap and shouted "I shot the infidel" as he left the scene. News agencies reported, that the shooter had been identified as "Ogün Samast", a 17-year-old from Trabzon. the same city where, a year before Dink's assassination, an Italian Catholic priest was shot dead by a 16-year-old native of the city, in front of a church. That event might have inspired Dink's assassination. In recent years, Trabzon has become an important recruiting place for the chauvinistic movement. Samast's father identified him from the publicly released photos and alerted the authorities. Six people, including Samast's friend Yasin Hayal, who had been involved in a bombing of a McDonald's restaurant in Trabzon in 2004, were taken into custody and brought to Istanbul. Later that evening, news of Samast's capture in Samsun was announced. It was confirmed that the alleged assassin Ogün Samast had been captured, with the assassination weapon on him. Thousands of citizens attended his funeral and about a hundred thousand people protested against his murder and the Article 301. The service was attended by members of the Turkish government and representatives from the Armenian diaspora, as well as religious leaders. After his death, an increasing awareness of minority rights grew in Turkey. Two streets in Lyon and Diyarbakır and a children's park in Kınalıada were named after him and he was immortalized as a symbol of minority rights in Turkey. Dink was one of Turkey's most prominent Armenian voices and, despite threats on his life, he refused to remain silent. He always said his aim was to improve the difficult relationship between Turks and Armenians. Active in various democratic platforms and civil society organizations, Hrant Dink emphasized the need for democratization in Turkey and focused on the issues of free speech, minority rights, civil rights and issues pertaining to the Armenian community in Turkey. He was a very important peace activist. In his public speeches, which were often intensely emotional, he never refrained from using the word genocide when talking about the Armenian Genocide, a term fiercely rejected by Turkey. He also changed the way how most Turks see Armenians and vice versa. Isabelle Kortian who is a prominent member of the diaspora said: "It was surprising to see Turkish people embracing Hrant Dink". Agree or disagree with him, it is not a matter of politics. Everyone would agree that killing an innocent man who was married and had children is disgusting. Hopefully , a tragedy like this will never happen again. Category:Blog posts